1.
New South Wales
–
New South Wales is a state on the east coast of Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria to the south and it has a coast line with the Tasman Sea on its east side. The Australian Capital Territory is an enclave within the state, New South Wales state capital is Sydney, which is also Australias most populous city. In March 2014, the population of New South Wales was 7.5 million. Just under two-thirds of the population,4.67 million. Inhabitants of New South Wales are referred to as New South Welshmen, the Colony of New South Wales was founded as a penal colony in 1788. It originally comprised a more than half of the Australian mainland with its western boundary set at 129th meridian east in 1825, in addition, the colony also included the island territories of New Zealand, Van Diemens Land, Lord Howe Island, and Norfolk Island. During the 19th century, most of the area was detached to form separate British colonies that eventually became New Zealand. However, the Swan River Colony has never administered as part of New South Wales. Lord Howe Island remains part of New South Wales, while Norfolk Island has become a federal Territory, as have the now known as the Australian Capital Territory. The prior inhabitants of New South Wales were the Aboriginal tribes who arrived in Australia about 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, before European settlement there were an estimated 250,000 Aboriginal people in the region. The Wodi Wodi people are the custodians of the Illawarra region of South Sydney. The Bundjalung people are the custodians of parts of the northern coastal areas. The European discovery of New South Wales was made by Captain James Cook during his 1770 survey along the eastern coast of the Dutch-named continent of New Holland. In his original journal covering the survey, in triplicate to satisfy Admiralty Orders, Cook first named the land New Wales, however, in the copy held by the Admiralty, he revised the wording to New South Wales. After years of chaos and anarchy after the overthrow of Governor William Bligh, macquaries legacy is still evident today. During the 19th century, large areas were separated to form the British colonies of Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria. Responsible government was granted to the New South Wales colony in 1855, following the Treaty of Waitangi, William Hobson declared British sovereignty over New Zealand in 1840

2.
Australian Capital Territory
–
The Australian Capital Territory is the federal district in the south east of Australia, enclaved within New South Wales. Its only city is Canberra, the city of Australia. The ACT also has a strip of territory around the southern end of the Beecroft Peninsula. The need for a territory was flagged by colonial delegates during the Federation conventions of the late 19th century. Section 125 of the Australian Constitution provided that, following Federation in 1901, the territory was transferred to the Commonwealth by the state of New South Wales in 1911, two years prior to the naming of Canberra as the national capital in 1913. The floral emblem of the ACT is the royal bluebell and the emblem is the gang-gang cockatoo. The economic activity of the Australian Capital Territory is heavily concentrated around Canberra and this trend continued into 2016, when the territory was ranked the third best performing out of all of Australias states and territories. There is a proportion of young adults in the region compared with other Australian states or territories. Approximately one-fifth of ACT residents were born outside of Australia, mainly in the United Kingdom, almost one-fifth speak a language other than English at home, the most common being Chinese. The ACT also has a strip of territory around the southern end of the Beecroft Peninsula. Apart from the city of Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory also contains agricultural land, small townships and communities located within the ACT include Williamsdale, Naas, Uriarra, Tharwa and Hall. There are a range of mountains, rivers and creeks in the Namadgi National Park. These include the Naas and Murrumbidgee Rivers, Canberra is noted for its warm to hot, dry summers, and cold winters with occasional fog and frequent frosts. Many of the mountains in the territorys south-west are snow-covered for at least part of the winter. Thunderstorms can occur between October and March, and annual rainfall is 623 mm, with rainfall highest in spring and summer, the highest maximum temperature recorded in the ACT was 42.8 °C at Acton on 11 January 1939. The lowest minimum temperature was −14.6 °C at Gudgenby on 11 July 1971, notable geological formations in the Australian Capital Territory include the Canberra Formation, the Pittman Formation, Black Mountain Sandstone and State Circle Shale. In the 1840s fossils of brachiopods and trilobites from the Silurian period were discovered at Woolshed Creek near Duntroon, at the time, these were the oldest fossils discovered in Australia, though this record has now been far surpassed. Other specific geological places of interest include the State Circle cutting, the oldest rocks in the ACT date from the Ordovician around 480 million years ago

3.
Australia
–
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia